Marco's Future

Early one morning Orphan and Elf jumped on the local Vomit Comet bus from a rural village to Quanzhou.

They rolled through green Fujian foothills and lush farmland. Men worked oxen in rice paddies. Woman lugged baskets of greens and califlower to market. Children burned plastic trash along the road. Half-finished new rising middle class brick construction projects littered the landscape. The bus stopped. People crowded on. 

45 minutes later they reached the town. Maybe it was a city or a large village. The bus station was packed with peasants, sellers, noodle slurpers, and hustlers among grateful masses. 

They walked through a maze of alleys into the old heart. The heart is a lonely hunter. 

On a sidewalk a man hacked at a fawn selling fresh cuts. People scrambled to buy fresh meat. A woman pedaled past selling yellow carnations. A boy ran pulling a kite. A girl fed her sister. Women scrubbed clothes. An old man smoked in shadows.

At a venerable tea house made of bamboo in a shaded garden surrounded by jasmine they met Marco Polo.

I am on my way West along the Silk Road, he said. I don't know it yet but I will meet Kubliai Khan and stay with him for 3 incredible years. Maybe around 1271. We will play chess together. He will show me his plans to conquer the known world.

Orphan said, Such a grand adventure. We come here every weekend to explore and meet fascinating people and world travelers like you.

Elf said, Yes, and we know a Chinese fortune teller at a pagoda. He's excellent.

May I meet him, asked Marco. Sure, said Elf, Let's go.

They traveled through twisted, convoluted mazes and discovered an enormous pagoda. Red, yellow, golden roofs curved into blue sky. Five-clawed yellow dragons holding white pearls curled corners. Men, woman and children burned incense, mumbling prayers. Red cloth covered Buddha statue faces. Not ready to see. 

There he is, Orphan said, pointing at Confucius behind a table.

Marco introduced himself, What is my future.

Confucius asked Marco questions about his birth date, place, and family lineage. He opened a big brown book with faded yellow pages. He ran a bony finger down lines. He spoke in tongues, Among other adventures you will be imprisoned in Italy. You will tell your stories to another prisoner. You will be famous.

I only told half of what I saw, said Marco, smiling, scrawling notes. Elf made an image for historians.

Thanks Ray

Ray Bradbury has passed at 91.

Venus transits the sun. Ray headed North.

“It was one frenzy after one elation after one enthusiasm after one hysteria after another,” he wrote, noting, “You rarely have such fevers later in life that fill your entire day with emotion.”

Fahrenheit 451, Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, among others.

He never went to college. His university was the library.

A very great and unusual talent.

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

"It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

Thanks Ray. 

Trust and smile

Don't you just love the name of a school in Cambodia?

It sings on a clean white sign propped against a brick wall along an endless red rutted swampy road.

Down the road from a pagoda wat where friends and relatives create a cremation. He was 70.

He survived the genocide. That says something. 

The rainy season brings endless pleasure minus pain to natives and aliens.

Milling around is an art form here.

TRUST and SMILE.

Practice with friends and strangers. 

hello june

Goodbye May. Pound out your bright beautiful future. 

A Turkish man with a hammer. Gypsy music. 

Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone.

We began in India. Wandering no name alleys, streets, villages, rivers, valleys, mountains.

Darkness whispers, Who's there?

I received a reprieve from death row one night in Vietnam. My sentence was commuted to life without parole. A South American writer said parole means speech, word, a word of honor.

Parole is the condition under which you are free, with a language and human awareness.

Human freedom is unconditional.

Memory fades into living color remembered with absolute infinity. Desperate hands fold across heaving chests, feeling abandoned sucking air injuries. Stop the bleeding. Start the breathing. 

It rained yesterday. It was long sweet and slow and heavy. Streets became quiet. Everyone huddled in corners of their mind. 

Why is nature so cruel, they cried. Nature laughed, Hahaha. Human tears fell like rain. Tears flooded their memory of nothing.

Today the sun came out. It was hot. Humans cried, Why is nature so cruel. Nature laughed.

 

Scientists say old memory is not destroyed, but that many copies of the same memory could exist in parallel.

They say your memory is only as good as your last memory rather than based on your initial memory.

Speak memory.

“Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses
from the top of his wall.
A thorn from that is still in my palm,
working deeper.” - Rumi 

Brick Boy in Nepal

 

My name is Brick Boy. I live, work and die in the Kathmandu valley. The valley contains hundreds of brick factories. Millions of people like me work here. It's our fate.

A woman I never met carries them at a construction site in Bhaktapur. Exciting.

Labor.

The factories are owned by rich people. We plant, harvest, cull, clean, stack, carry, haul and sell bricks. Bricks are an essential way of life. They get formed, stacked, sorted, assembled, counted, controlled, and used. Like me and the others.

We are a tool of production.

I've got a mind to give up living and go shopping instead.

My future is safe and brilliant.